This book is a great reference book, and clears up a lot of misinformation about Joe McCarthy.

LIES WERE MANUFACTURED AND DESIGNED FROM THE BEGINNING,
TO USE McCARTHY AS THE “POSTER CHILD” FOR IMAGINARY ACCUSATIONS,IN ORDER TO NEUTRALIZE THE TRUTH

Almost all of academia, the vast majority of the press, and most of the public, have been saying McCarthy was nuts, even at the time Joe McCarthy was trying to reveal Communist infiltration. At that time, any of McCarthy’s mistaken claims, and things he did out of frustration, were magnified and repeated. He was effectively discounted — but Joe McCarthy was actually provably right about the Communist infiltration of our government!

He came on the scene soon after the Whittaker Chambers/Alger Hiss investigations and trial(s) (1948). In 1948 the statute of limitations had passed, so Alger Hiss couldn’t be put in prison for being a Soviet espionage agent. But he was proven guilty of being a Soviet espionage agent, and was convicted and put in prison for perjury – – for saying he was not a Soviet espionage agent.

Joe McCarthy was effectively used by the Left, as a good neutralizing force that diverted people away from the reality that Alger Hiss and other Soviet Communists had become part of our government, and were doing damage.

THE FACT OF SOVIET COMMUNIST INFILTRATION AND THEIR
WORK IN OUR GOVERNMENT IS PROVEN THROUGH THOUSANDS OF RESOURCES

Thanks to testimony and books by some Communist defectors, records from some Communist archives, the release of our own U.S. counter espionage work in the Venona* documents released in 1995, and years of research by M. Stanton Evans and others, this information about Joe McCarthy is now available to the public.

The more I study this part of our history, the more shocked I am at how much Soviet Communists had infiltrated into our government, how many in our government (even at top levels) knew about it, and the degree of free reign some of them were given, without being stopped.

So many of these Soviet espionage agents and supporters in our government
were never identified!

Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies

Accused of creating a bogus Red Scare and smearing countless innocent victims in a five-year reign of terror, Senator Joseph McCarthy is universally remembered as a demagogue, a bully, and a liar. History has judged him such a loathsome figure that even today, a half century after his death, his name remains synonymous with witch hunts.
But that conventional image is all wrong, as veteran journalist and author M. Stanton Evans reveals in this groundbreaking book. The long-awaited “Blacklisted by History,” based on six years of intensive research, dismantles the myths surrounding Joe McCarthy and his campaign to unmask Communists, Soviet agents, and flagrant loyalty risks working within the U.S. government. Evans’s revelations completely overturn our understanding of McCarthy, McCarthyism, and the Cold War.

Drawing on primary sources–including never-before-published government records and FBI files, as well as recent research gleaned from Soviet archives and intercepted transmissions between Moscow spymasters and their agents in the United States–Evans presents irrefutable evidence of a relentless Communist drive to penetrate our government, influence its policies, and steal its secrets. Most shocking of all, he shows that U.S. officials supposedly guarding against this danger not only let it happen but actively covered up the penetration. All of this was precisely as Joe McCarthy contended.
“Blacklisted by History” shows, for instance, that the FBI knew as early as 1942 that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the atomic bomb project, had been identified by Communist leaders as a party member; that high-level U.S. officials were warned that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy almost a decade before the Hiss case became a public scandal; that a cabal of White House, Justice Department, and State Department officials lied about and covered up the Amerasia spy case; and that the State Department had been heavily penetrated by Communists and Soviet agents before McCarthy came on the scene.

Evans also shows that practically everything we’ve been told about McCarthy is false, including conventional treatment of the famous 1950 speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, that launched the McCarthy era (“I have here in my hand . . .”), the Senate hearings that casually dismissed his charges, the matter of leading McCarthy suspect Owen Lattimore, the Annie Lee Moss case, the Army-McCarthy hearings, and much more.

In the end, Senator McCarthy was censured by his colleagues and condemned by the press and historians. But as Evans writes, “The real Joe McCarthy has vanished into the mists of fable and recycled error, so that it takes the equivalent of a dragnet search to find him.”

“Blacklisted by History” provides the first accurate account of what McCarthy did and, more broadly, what happened to America during the Cold War. It is a revealing expose of the forces that distorted our national policy in that conflict and our understanding of its history since.